Witch-Burning via Twitter

Jon Ronson’s New York Times piece on what happened to people who tweeted something obnoxious or immoral, and who had their reputations destroyed by social-media shaming, is must reading. He focuses on Justine Sacco, the Manhattan PR executive who was en route to visit family in South Africa when she tweeted from Heathrow a wisecrack about how she won’t get AIDS there, because she’s white.

It was, she says, her lame attempt to poke fun at the bubble of privilege Westerners live in. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but whatever the truth, thanks to Twitter, by the time she landed in South Africa, her reputation was in tatters. Her family in South Africa, supporters of the ANC, accused her of ruining the family’s reputation. Turns out there are others like her. Ronson writes:

In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it. The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere. Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.

Consider this poor soul:

I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture. It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.

The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. Two days later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.

“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but” — he paused — “when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”

For a dorky joke like that! Turns out the woman whose tweet got him fired was herself fired after the social-media mob turned on her and made her life hell. Un-freaking-believable.

Obsessive-compulsive message hygiene by the big parties encourages a puritanical media hunt for specks of inconsistency and deviation. Then mainstream debate becomes sterile and the fringe more fertile. We cherish free speech but have become tyrannically unforgiving of the misspoken word. There is no benefit of the doubt, no concession for an honest motive poorly executed. It is meant as a defence against dishonesty and hypocrisy. But when the presumption takes hold that all players are hiding their true selves, politics becomes a parlour game where the aim is to trip your opponent so their mask slips.

Then, when nationalist demagogues arrive on the scene with an agenda that history has shown to be divisive and sinister yet also seductive when portrayed as the antidote to a corrupt establishment, what happens? The mainstream parties and commentators say: “It is a facade behind which lurks something ugly. These people blow a dog-whistle. They say one thing but mean another.” And the response, dangerously plausible, comes back: “No, it is you who wear the masks and speak in codes. We are the plain speakers and the unmaskers.”

Ever seen this astonishing performance by Labour Party leader Ed Miliband? This is what the Grauniad is talking about:

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 65 comments

65 Responses to Witch-Burning via Twitter

I’m old enough to remember being lectured about not putting anything in an email that you didn’t want published on the front page of the New York Times. I’ve gotten away with a lot online–but anybody who puts things out there (twitter, facebook, email, etc.) that is not sanitized is asking for trouble. I can’t be too sympathetic to this person who is in so much trouble–presumably she has heard the rules about what you put out there and what you keep to yourself.

Rod: “[i]t was utterly vicious and callous to destroy her professional life with that online bonfire. I would say that if she had written a blog post snarking at me.”

Wait. All of us are doing the exact same thing on this blog and in other public comment forums anytime we ridicule or criticize the public statements of someone else.

When you wrote the post criticizing Samantha Allen’s complaint about the Mormon church you probably didn’t want her fired from Huffington Post or any other place she was employed. You probably also weren’t trying to get other bloggers to join you in your critiques. But both of those types of things are completely foreseeable, possibly inevitable in some small number of cases, yet entirely socially acceptable conduct by you.

When you comment in the public square you should expect rebuttal. You should also know that the rebuttal can be loud, which means it can also be uncontrollably influential.

Incidentally, it’s not clear from the post that the PR exec was “professionally ruined” as opposed to merely humiliated.

Mr. Ewiack has been posting here enough to show that he’s a stereotypical left-wing Puritan (or a masterful caricature of one). So yes, he is that delicate.

One of the best parts of this blog is that the commentariat regularly demonstrates that grim, humorless, self-righteous, ideological Puritanism can be found on both sides of the political divide.

The irony is that, without a doubt, at some point someone is going to take something Mr. Ewiack says as being somehow racist or sexist or genderist or something, and he will be shamed. It’s the price you pay for being around dogmatic people who constantly one-up each other in self-righteousness.

I have to say that I agree with the firing of Justine Sacco. Her being senior director of global communications means that this is exactly the kind of thing she is supposed to know not to do. I would assume that a big part of her job is making sure that her company doesn’t make such foolish mistakes and cleaning things up if they should happen. If I were her boss, this incident would make me seriously question whether this was the right person to be in charge of PR at my company and leave me with very little confidence in her. If she didn’t have the job she had, let’s say she was in charge of IT or accounting, then I would disagree with her firing.

Regarding your reference to the “Grauniad” rather than the “Guardian,” don’t you generally think it better to refer to people and organizations by their proper names, rather than mangling their names to show disrespect or belittle?

First: that’s kind of the POINT in mistyping Briain’s best designed but worst spelling newspaper: referrings to people and organizations by their proper names is not what it is known for.

Second: why waste respect on contemptible turn-coat swag who abandoned Labour when the prospects of Liberalism – now heading for a complete electoral wipe-out – under Nicky Cleggover ( soon to be un-elected as an MP by the good people of Hallam, it appears ) loomed so bright?

She made a joke at the expense of people she felt it was ok to make fun of.

Does it bother you at all that what Ms. Sacco said had a large kernel of, you know, truth in it? (People of African descent, and especially Africans living in Africa, tend to be much more vulnerable to HIV than white people. It’s uncertain why, but there’s a hypothesis that white Europeans have some cross-resistance to HIV as a result of having evolved resistance to the plague). I make morbid jokes to the effect of the one Ms. Sacco made with my friends, all the time.

But, of course, science is as always less important than political correctness.

I wonder about the “guy with the dorky joke”. Either that’s not all the story, or they were just itching for an excuse to fire him, or they were cutting employment because the CEO did something stupid with the company and this poor soul just ended up on the wrong side of the line.

HeartRight, I wasn’t aware that the Guardian had sunk so low, but I must agree that “To be unduly respectful towards a cockroach is to become a cockroach.”

In the USA, the National Guardian had a rather different profile. If its still publishing, I haven’t looked for a while, it sunk to new lows in a different direction. I will always remember fondly, however, that it broke with the little Maoist splinters to clearly condemn Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi, unambiguously supporting MPLA and by implication Cuba’s direct intervention against the invasion by the South African Offense Forces. (MPLA of course went the way of almost any political party after twenty years of civil war funded by oil money — its all about the oil money now).

Hector_St_Clare: “[S]cience is always less important than political correctness.”

This is quite a stupid statement. She claims she was making a joke about liberal FALSE conceptions about whites not getting HIV. She was not offering a science-based opinion that whites could not actually get HIV because, of course, whites do get HIV – by the millions! The fact that a relatively small number of whites may be immune to HIV because of Delta 32 is irrelevant to whether her joke was offensive. She obviously felt it was terribly offensive and has been trying hard to undue the damage. So she certainly doesn’t think there’s any science to justify her offensive remark.

Irene, your vehemence is entirely out of sync with the significance of the subject under discussion. I probably wouldn’t have laughed at the joke. But we have a limited span of time on this earth, and I for one have a great deal still to do before I am called away. Establishing universal standards for humor and suppressing bad taste does not rank very high on my list.